Relocating to and from places used to be about jobs, budget sizes for houses and bedroom numbers. Now, it’s becoming more and more about relocating to politically like-minded places.
Red & Blue Zip Codes Becoming Redder & Bluer
Almost 15 years ago, journalist Bill Bishop wrote a provocative book titled The Big Sort. Bishop’s premise in the book was that Americans were increasingly clustering into communities of like-minded people – like-minded in terms of religion, lifestyle and/or politics. The more clustering, the more homogenous the communities and the more unanimous and sometimes radical the thinking.
At least in politics, such clustering has continued to increase.
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According to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, this clustering, this “sorting,” has led to the nation’s political landscape becoming more polarized. For example, during the 2020 Presidential election, Trump dominated heavily Republican, white, rural counties in the Greater South, Interior West and Great Plains. Biden ‘s election advantage came in heavily populated big cities, college towns and smaller counties with larger percentages of heavily Democratic nonwhite voters.
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato posted an analysis online about the growth of either heavily Republican or Democratic “sorted” counties…they increased from 6% in the 2004 election to 22% in the 2020 election.
“People Will Vote with Their Feet”
Redfin has predicted that in 2022, “people will vote with their feet, moving to places that align with their politics.”
Lynn Seeden, a 59-year-old photographer from Orange County CA, commented on a private Facebook group page with some 8,000 members called Conservatives Moving to Texas, “Tell me about the most conservative towns. Where should I be moving?”
Tiffany Wooten, a 43-year-old stay-at-home mom whose family relocated from conservative Indiana to liberal Austin, said, “We were looking at blue cities because we wanted to be with our own people.”
Pros & Cons to Living Where People Agree with You
Journalist/author Bishop said that the “sorting” trend has only intensified since The Big Sort was published 14 years ago. Bishop said, “They are still sorting themselves in ways that end up (making) places increasingly Republican or increasingly Democratic. Then you can see that playing out in Congress. There are fewer people in the middle. And so politics becomes less about solving our problems anymore. It’s about cheering for our side, and so we’re stuck.”
For those relocating to ZIP codes to be with their own tribe, Wooten from Indiana who moved with her family to Austin said, “We feel good here, we feel safe here…we feel among our people in Austin.”
Seeden, the photographer who moved from California to Texas, said, “As soon as I drove into Texas, literally, as soon as I could get into the state and stop at my first truck stop for gas it was, like, ‘This is wonderful…People weren’t wearing masks – nobody cared. It’s kind of like heaven on earth.'”
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Thanks to National Public Radio.
